How Does Google Rank Websites? It’s a Very Simple Process.

There’s countless websites on Google, but how do they actually get ranked there? I’ll explain the process and show you how to make sure they spot yours. This is the short explanation:

As a guide on helping you rank better, I cannot say for sure how often I’ve wrote on this topic (here is a guide), but that was from one point of view (the blogger/page owners) but this time around, I want to approach the topic from the opposite end, from Google’s that is and explain how they look at websites from the moment their spiders land on it to the moment they index, then rank it and based on all of that, show you how to leverage this information so you can maximally benefit from it. 

Let me just say that there is a truly complex and constantly evolving algorithm in place by Google that has so many equations and formulas that combine to create a complexity in understanding it fully from their end and the truth is we honestly never will, BUT they do give us information on what they want to see.

So that mixed in with my experience will be enough to show you how they operate and how you attack this subject properly. 

So let’s break down how Google ranks pages on your website:

There’s a flow to this and it starts with the following point…

1) Google is itself a website.

It’s one that has an ever expanding area of digital space so it can gather as many pages on it’s search engine as possible.

But it’s not just going to take every page it finds and clutter it everywhere. No, there’s an actual organization process going on and we’ll talk about that shortly.

2) But how does it actually FIND your page and/or anyone else’s page/s?

Well if you have a website such as WordPress, you have an automatic function within it that does what’s known as “pinging”. It’s basically a function that knocks on Google’s doors and tells it’s spiders to come to your page to view it. 

Besides WordPress, there are other platforms which do the same thing, but in my experience, WordPress is one of the best, so you should ideally have a WP site if you’re going to do this. Create a website here. 

3) The pinging function occurs once you publish a new page.

A ping is sent out to the search engine and in return, it’s spiders come to check out what you published. This process is known as “crawling” and it happens very often on the new content you publish, plus existing content that you edit, add to or one that gets comments. 

You can also manually utilize this process and sometimes get your page/s “crawled” within minutes. Here is how to do this, although do note this is optional and honestly, you don’t really need to do this if you already have a WordPress page, as it does that work for you, it just initially takes a little bit longer, but eventually it all ends up the same way and the spiders will always come and crawl your page.

4) The spiders analyze what is on the page you published…

And what happens initially is what’s known as an index, meaning an index on the actual search engine. 

5) Followed by that is an initial ranking.

What happens is that the spiders see what keywords are used in your meta information, which is basically an identification for your article. Here’s info on meta data and how to use it to get rankings in Google.

For example, if I write an article on surviving in the wilderness and I label my meta information with keywords on that, my ranking on the search engine will be results where people type up information on surviving in the wilderness.

 It’s basically a form of organizing and placing my article in relevant search results so the relevant audience who seeks info on surviving will be able to see my article on surviving. Get it? 

6) Your article is placed on a particular page in the search results, and generally it is not on the first page. 

There is usually a hierarchy of where your article is placed and generally it depends on several important ranking factors like these.

• But to summarize, new websites that have very few articles generally place page 2 and down on the search results.
• Others which have a lot of articles will be placed in the 1st-3rd search results.
• The ones which have a plethora of articles will generally be the ones which hit the 1st page rankings and if not that, then the second, but it’s top tier at this point for those ones. 

In short, your website’s quantity of articles and especially the quality of the content in those articles plays a pivotal role in it’s ranking hierarchy (but it’s not the only one).

Your positioning is also dependent on the number of other articles and other websites out there who also seek a position on Google for the same type of content you’re writing.

If we take the same article I wrote on surviving in the wilderness, let’s be real here and admit that I’m not the only person who writes that type of content. There’s honestly millions of other people who do this and they all want their article to be positioned at the top. 

Now besides those factors I linked to above, which can absolutely help you position your articles above the competition, you also need to understand that you can have a competitive advantage against the other pages if you properly follow guidelines like these that help me rank on the first page. 

Believe me, regardless of how many other articles are out there fighting for the top position, you can totally beat them if you follow the guidelines I listed.

You have to understand that Google doesn’t just position your article in one spot and that’s where it’ll stay. No, that’s not how it works. And that brings me to another aspect of this topic that is important to comprehend:

7) There is always a re positioning process going on with your pages. 

There exists a “cool” and “frustrating” term called the Google dance in which your page, after it indexes and lands somewhere on the search engine, it’ll bounce around from a high up page position to a lower one and it’ll do it very often.

However, this is great news for people whose articles land very low or further down on the search engine’s page results, because it means there’s a chance their article will bounce UP and this has been my experience in doing SEO for years and utilizing the tips I linked you guys to in the previous 2 tutorials on ranking on the first page and the factors by which a page’s rank out positions the rest. 

You seriously need to read those and use the tips I pointed to. Furthermore, do not worry about your page bouncing back down if it positions itself very high up. The great news is that pages which utilize the same tips I recommend using generally get a higher favor-ability from Google and when they position high up, they tend to stay up there far longer and possibly even forever. 

A summary of how Google finds and ranks your website:

1) Your website has a pinging option. That’s really the signal (You can also use Google Webmaster Tools for faster results).

2) That pinging option attracts spiders.

3) Those spiders crawl your page and index your articles on Google.

4) A ranking process occurs to ideally place your article in the most relevant search results possible (re-read the example in which I wrote about the survival article ranking survival terms).

5) If you properly build up your overall page, your articles will continually get re-crawled and their position will in time rise higher, ideally hitting the 1st position, of the 1st page for multiple search results. 

The ideal way to leverage this whole system…

Just so we’re clear, ideally you want to, as a site owner to have this system work for you in that all your articles get ranked highly and attract the most amount of visitors and the good news is that if you read information from Google’s blog itself, they will tell you much of the same stuff I am here, but probably in a more vague way than I. 

This ideal scenario can really happen if you’ve done it and seen it through your own experiences, but if you haven’t and you’re thinking about starting a page, then I would highly recommend the following:

There is absolutely limitless and tremendous opportunity with the system that Google has developed, and it can totally be leveraged to incredible levels if you know what to do. I hope this article has clearly explained how this search engine operates with the way it finds and ranks websites.